A women for Four Seasons.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

WHEN politicians take to the podium to pronounce on international affairs, they have a choice between two approaches: the survey speech and the theme speech. Diplomats, bureaucrats, and others of a careful disposition are happiest when their politicians choose the former, because it is safer.

Politicians who have firm opinions normally prefer the latter--theme speeches with a simple central argument. These are the statements that can be recalled years later, often by a single word or phrase--as, say, Churchill's 1940 speeches may be evoked with the words "defiance" and "resolution."

It is surprising, therefore, that when the marvelously opinionated Margaret Thatcher delivered her first major post-prime-ministerial speech in Washington on March 8, she chose to give her audience of four hundred conservatives a survey rather than a theme speech. Admittedly, it was an unusually pungent survey, strikingly free from voguishness and cant--not a single "interdependence" in the text, and only one "new world order," and that only to make a joke. But the speech had no overarching theme.

Still, there are a couple of things to be said about its overall character. First, it was Atlantic- and Eurocentered to a remarkable degree, with only three passing references to Japan, and with China, India, South Asia, South America, and Africa not mentioned at all.

True, most of those present at the Four Seasons Hotel may not have noticed these omissions. For, with some notable exceptions, American conservatives share the priorities represented by the speech: the United States, Europe, and the Middle East are important; the rest is not. It is a world view that helps explain why conservatives are regularly surprised by certain categories of events, and why over the years our soldiers have ended up fighting in places like Korea, Vietnam, and the Falkland Islands.

Which brings me to the other general point: The speech contained no recognition of some of the dilemmas posed for conservatives by the end of the cold war--e.g., what balance should be struck between stability and liberty as the Communist world disintegrates? It would have been interesting and useful to hear Mrs. Thatcher on such issues, at a time when they threaten conservative unity.

Still, what she did say was interesting enough. The first third of the speech was taken up-very properly-with celebrating and claiming credit for victory in the cold war. This is worth doing, not only because the cold war has been the central international event in the adult life of anyone under 65, but also because there are different versions of how it ended, and which one prevails is going to have great significance. Smart liberals-Michael Kinsley comes to mind-recognized this early and moved quickly to try to distribute credit equally between conservatives and liberals. Others have insisted that the thaw was all due to changes inside the Soviet leadership, and that Western policy was more or less irrelevant. Mrs. Thatcher effectively combatted such liberal claims with her stress on the importance of the "new directions" taken by the U.S. and Britain and, in particular, on the role of Ronald Reagan as "the pilot that weathered the storm."

The speech went on to discuss the Soviet Union, and this section was less satisfactory. She admonished the reformers in the Soviet Union to overcome their divisions and not to falter, but on the substance of the dispute among them and the question of on whose terms unity should be restored-which is rather vital-she had no explicit advice. Implicitly, though, she clearly sides with Gorbachev. She believes that he "remains a reformer at heart" who has "begun the withdrawal of Soviet troops; accepted arms reduction for the first time; and cut support for Communist insurgencies across the world." Fair enough, if what you are about is making the best case for a friend. But it is not Gorbachev's heart but his mind and his level of competence that are at issue.

Apart from a perfunctory concluding section on the Middle East, the rest of the speech was about Europe and NATO. It was here that Margaret Thatcher came fully into her own, delivering a series of unrepentant hammer blows for the cause that was largely responsible for her downfall. In fact, here we find embedded within the sprawling survey the guts of a genuine theme speech. And the unambiguous theme was this: Stay with the tried and the tested-national sovereignty, NATO, American leadership, free trade-and be not tempted by the dangerous utopian notion of a European superstate.

Not only does Mrs. Thatcher spurn the idea that NATO's role is over with the end of the cold war, but she argues for its enlargement. Those Eastern European countries which have left the Warsaw Pact should be given associate membership in NATO, she said, and the Organization should assume out-of-area responsibilities. As for the European Community, its true political mission is not to press for unity but "to anchor new and vulnerable democracies more securely to freedom and to the West," and to that end it should offer full membership to any country of Eastern or Central Europe that opts for democracy and the free market. In the realm of foreign, defense, and economic policies, Mrs. Thatcher believes that the call for a united, single European policy is a call for exclusiveness, self-absorption, and protectionism, at the expense of cooperation with the United States and openness to the world.

THE MOST effective and commented-on rhetoric in the speech was contained in two paragraphs which contrasted America as a created nation, built upon an idea and brought into being swiftly, with the nations of Europe, which are the slowly evolved product of history rather than of philosophy. Mrs. Thatcher further maintained that

You can construct a nation on an idea; but you cannot reconstruct a nation on the basis of one." Some commentators (e.g., David Broder in the Washington Post) have reacted to these paragraphs as if they were part of an examination question that demanded dissection and refutation. But rather than quibble and qualify in this way (of course, the United States has not been immune from history, and of course ideas can modify the history of European states) it is surely better to appreciate and ponder the latent truth in this bit of political poetry.

Indeed, considering the text of a speech by Margaret Thatcher can never do justice to the delivered speech as an occasion and an experience. Her presence, the voice, the palpable force of her will, the poignancy of her recent fall, the unrestrained adoration of an audience of normally rather staid people-all this made the occasion one that transcended the text. I guess that in this case you really had to be on the scene.